Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 285 posts

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#131

Post by yen223 »

fduran wrote: post #106
Udo wrote: post #100

There are questions that are actually fun and I can sort of see them starting a conversation with the right kind of interviewer that tells both parties a lot about who they're dealing with. From the article: > How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle? Basic economics estimating - probably not that useful and a bit dull, but hey why not. At least the problem has several angles to it that might be…

> A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened? horrible question, it took me a few seconds to figure out they are talking about the game Monopoly.

Not sure what the point of this question is. It seems all it does is to test whether the candidate has heard of Monopoly.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#132

Post by jmillikin »

How to drive clicks in four steps:

1. Invent a bunch of silly riddles that a non-technical reader might accept as tech interview questions.

2. Pull a major tech company out of a hat (today it's Google), and claim with no evidence that their interviews are based around silly riddles. The article will be cited for years as proof that people working at $COMPANY are weird and obtuse.

3. Wait a couple years. Ignore all evidence that $COMPANY does not use silly riddles in interviews.

4. Once traffic on the original article dies down, write another article claiming $COMPANY has "admitted" silly riddles aren't useful for interviews.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#133

Post by engtech »

donohoe wrote: post #122
edent wrote: post #3

The original article - http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-huntin... Distraction free reading and without all the annoying cruft of Quartz. Fascinating use of "Big Data" to cut through the bullshit. Wonder if it will change anything. I suspect the "tough" interview plays well into a company's PR.

We built Quartz to be as distraction free as possible - mind telling me what the "cruft" is?

1. when I go to this link: http://qz.com/96206/google-admits-those-infamous-brainteaser...

It shows several stories at once, not just the google brainteasers stories.

2. In general, people would rather read the real article instead of a summary of the article. When someone submits a summary of an article to a site like HN or reddit, it is usually flagged as blog-spam because we'd rather read/support the original content than a summary with questionable value.

3. For long form articles, nothing beats reading the print-preview page to get rid of all the sidebars, comments, ads. Look at the print preview page: it is not possible to get less distraction free than that. Any other format has more distractions.

Even aside from that, the New York Times has some of the best information architecture in the business. These are the guys who did NYTProf. Their web team is awesome.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

4. Some visual issues I had with quartz:

4.1: No left/right whitespace around images.

4.2: I see a vertical scroll bar in the middle of my screen on Firefox.

4.3 The black header bar which is fixed and stays on the screen all the time even though it conveys no useful information to me.

4.4: A bunch of text blurbs on the left side of the screen that convey no useful information to me.

You say you're trying to be as distraction free as possible, but that's not actually true because it isn't possible to have your business model and be as distraction free as possible. The print preview page is as distraction free as possible.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#134

Post by mik3y »

raldi wrote: post #130

I've never seen any citation that Google ever used these kinds of question. Especially the idiotic one about pushing a car to a hotel. I think it was just an urban legend and a good piece of linkbait. There must be thousands of people on HN who interviewed at Google over the years. Did anyone ever get a question like this?

I conducted hundreds of interviews at Google and never once asked (or saw someone else on my slate ask) a brainteaser such as these. Urban legend.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#135

Post by ig1 »

Ziomislaw wrote: post #95
ig1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The underlying data might be different but the process is the same, you need to figure out what are the contributing factors, how they relate and establish an upper and lower bounds for the values you're assuming. Once you have data you can make corrections to those bounds, but other than that the process is the same. It's a skill that a lot of first time startup founders lack. They have no-idea how to estimate the m…

Process is not the same, in one case you have real data, in the other one you pull the data out of your arse.

It sounds like you build estimation models by looking at the data you have and combining it together to try and figure out your goal.

The disadvantage with that approach you often end up missing factors (because you don't have the data to hand) and end up with a suboptimal model.

In the same way that a lot of startups end up analyzing user behaviour by page analytics rather than user analytics simply because Google gives them page analytics.

It's a good idea to know how to do both top-down and bottom-up estimation models, as best practice is to make estimations using several different models and compare the results.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#136

Post by ndefinite »

kybernetyk wrote: post #114
SatvikBeri wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunning Kruger does not mean that unskilled people think they do better than skilled people. On average, the more competent people at any skill will rate their abilities higher than the less competent people. See this graph[0] from the original study[1] for a better explanation. [0]: https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/p480x... [1]: http://ttsg.org/pdfs/Dunning-Kruger%20Effect.pdf

I meant it the other way round: That some smart people won't have that "I show 'em" attitude and won't even try because they think they are too bad anyways.

The chart supports that assumption to some extent. The smartest are under estimating their percentile.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#137

Post by caf »

donohoe wrote: post #122
edent wrote: post #3

The original article - http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-huntin... Distraction free reading and without all the annoying cruft of Quartz. Fascinating use of "Big Data" to cut through the bullshit. Wonder if it will change anything. I suspect the "tough" interview plays well into a company's PR.

We built Quartz to be as distraction free as possible - mind telling me what the "cruft" is?

I don't know about cruft, but Quartz just doesn't work at all for me. The spinner just spins on, forever.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#138

Post by afandian »

donohoe wrote: post #122
edent wrote: post #3

The original article - http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-huntin... Distraction free reading and without all the annoying cruft of Quartz. Fascinating use of "Big Data" to cut through the bullshit. Wonder if it will change anything. I suspect the "tough" interview plays well into a company's PR.

We built Quartz to be as distraction free as possible - mind telling me what the "cruft" is?

I couldn't help biting.

1 - Viewing it in Android Chrome just doesn't work. See this comment and its responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5907648

2 - On some pages (with full-screen window), some or all of the thumb of the scroll bar is hidden on my browser under the black bar.

3 - As I drag the scrollbar down the size of the page jumps so my mouse pointer is no longer on the thumb.

4 - Sometimes I use the space bar to scroll because my hands are on the keyboard, not on the mouse. It doesn't work unless I click first.

5 - I often tile windows on my machine. This window is exactly width of the left-hand half of my screen (2011 MBP). Because of the responsive design I get a ToC when I visit the home page, which is annoying. It feels like the developers said "all users will have maximised windows".

Other frustrations I've had in the past but can't remember now, perhaps it was changed since last time I tried to use it on the desktop. I just get the feeling that (and Quartz isn't alone in this) the developers tried to re-implement functionality and didn't do it well enough to be worth it.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#139

Post by mseebach »

skrebbel wrote: post #53
hkmurakami wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

earlier in the interview he talks about preferring avoiding false positives over missing out on false negatives, so this practice does fit into their philosophy.

I suspected so. Still, as a super-amazingly competent genius engineer with no self esteem, I hope not many companies follow their lead.

What's the point of hiring a super-amazingly competent genius engineer if he's going to sit in a corner and think he's wrong all the time? If you don't offer your genius to the team, you might as well not have it.

And no, parceling out work for you to go and excel at on your own is likely not a good use of your skill.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#140

Post by stephencanon »

goblin89 wrote: post #17
edent wrote: post #3

The original article - http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-huntin... Distraction free reading and without all the annoying cruft of Quartz. Fascinating use of "Big Data" to cut through the bullshit. Wonder if it will change anything. I suspect the "tough" interview plays well into a company's PR.

Their findings wrt. formal education are interesting, too. The first time I see a big company's representative saying “test scores are worthless.”

Not really surprising at all. A huge amount of selection has already taken place by the time you get to the interview, and most of that selections is based either on grades or on other metrics that measure similar traits. The “low-GPA” individuals who get an interview are therefore very different from the general population of “low-GPA” individuals, and one expects there to be little or no correlation between GPA and success (if anything, I would expect negative correlation, as low-GPA individuals who get interviews will have something else going on that got them there).

This is almost exactly the same effect as the fact that SATs do not predict college GPA. SAT scores are used as one of the major factors for admission to colleges; having separated the students into cohorts based (partially) on SAT, it is completely expected that SAT scores have minimal correlation with grades assigned within each cohort.

Post reply on HN